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natural language processing

9,568 papers

#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

One Token Can Be Enough: Bridging Prompting and Activation Steering with Prefix Steering

Prompting guides language model behavior through the initial context, whereas activation steering often intervenes throughout generation. A natural question is whether steering can produce effects on subsequent computation similar to those of prompting. Under fixed-state attention assumptions, we establish sufficient c...

Xudong Zhu, Zhi-Hui Zhu · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Residual Visual Credit Optimization: Conserved Evidence Routing for Multimodal Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards scales multimodal reasoning, but an outcome reward says how much a trajectory is worth, not how that value should be spread over the decisions that produced it. We introduce Residual Visual Credit Optimization (RVCO), which treats token credit as a conserved routing proble...

Lin Qiu, Yao Liu, Di-Yi Hu et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

CURIO: Curiosity-Driven Test-Time Learning for Open-Ended Discovery

Open-ended discovery requires learning from repeated attempts while continuing to explore directions whose value is not yet apparent. Search with a frozen large language model (LLM) can reuse previous solutions in context, but cannot update the model from its successes and failures on the test problem. Reinforcement le...

Tao Feng, Fangxu Yu, Zi-Jie Lei et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Hierarchical Credit Assignment for RLVR on Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Geometry

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been shown to improve the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) across diverse reasoning tasks. However, group-based RLVR methods, such as GRPO, assign a uniform advantage to all tokens within rollouts of the same outcome. While existing works ref...

Qi Yu, Rui-Zhong Qiu, Zhichen Zeng et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Principled Top-$k$ Selection for Language Models with Hybrid Gradients

Selecting the best $k$ items out of $m$ candidates is a critical component of modern large language model systems, such as document selection in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and expert routing in Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs). However, training these selection modules remains challenging due to weak gradient signal...

Xu-Chen Gong, Ju Sun, Tian Li · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

ExpertMuon-Compass: Alignment-Guided Step Sizes for Mixture-of-Experts Training

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models send each token to a few experts, so each expert is trained on a different part of the data, and this part changes during training. With a shared learning rate, Muon applies updates of roughly the same size to expert matrices of the same shape, even when an expert's update is po...

Omatharv Bharat Vaidya, Ashwin Vinod, Pedram Akbarian et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint May 2026

MemArena: An Ego-Centric Benchmark for On-Device Agentic Personal Memory Assistants at Scale

This work evaluates five open-weight readers with Vanilla context, BM25-RAG, Oracle retrieval, Memobase, and MemSearch as memory backends, and finds that memory-backend choice matters more for content accuracy and permission-aware access fails in two distinct modes.

Jiadong Zhang, Xiao-Song Ma · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Cost-Effective Automated Judging of Natural-Language Mathematical Proofs

Grading natural-language mathematical proofs is a recurring cost in evaluating math-reasoning systems, and frontier LLM judges are expensive. We ask whether cheap open-weight models can serve as reliable judges given a candidate proof, a ground-truth proof, and a human-grading rubric. On a 200-instance validation sampl...

Benjamin Grayzel · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Safe Inference-Time Alignment via Lagrangian Reward Augmentation

Inference-time alignment steers a frozen language model during decoding using auxiliary reward signals, avoiding the cost of repeated weight updates. However, existing inference-time alignment methods typically optimize a single scalar score, so explicit safety constraints must either be ignored or encoded through manu...

Yaswanth Chittepu, Ativ Joshi, Sohini Chintala et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Office Comprehension Benchmark

We introduce Office Comprehension Bench (OCB), the first public benchmark to jointly evaluate LLM systems on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint comprehension over native file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) and their variants. OCB consists of two tracks. File Fidelity Q&A tests structural and visual perception of office artifac...

Firoz Shaik, Mateus Pican\c{c}o Lima Gomes, Tanvir Aumi et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Narrative-UFET: Narrative Generation for Ultra-Fine Entity Typing

Ultra-fine entity typing (UFET) assigns highly specific types to entity mentions, but current approaches struggle with types in the long tail. We hypothesize that a key limitation is the reliance on sentence-level context, since disambiguating evidence is often spread across multiple sentences. Testing this has been di...

Mreedul Gupta, Advait Deshmukh, Ashwin Umadi et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Gefen: Optimized Stochastic Optimizer

AdamW is a default optimizer for deep learning, but its moment states add two parameter-sized buffers to training memory, increasing the cost of large-scale pretraining. We propose Gefen, a memory-efficient optimizer that automatically shares second-moment estimates across parameter blocks and quantizes the first momen...

Nadav Benedek, Tomer Koren, Ohad Fried · 0 citations

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Microsoft Research Blog Oct 22, 2026

Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations

Flint-interactive gives AI agents a language for creating interactive visualizations. Click a chart, filter data, highlight related content, and explore beyond the view the author originally chose. The post Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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